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The Wellington patch has had a measurable positive effect on player retention, which is healthy for the game and keeps it growing. The player population has been breaking its all time record almost every day since it was released. New servers are necessary to spread out the population, it’s the same for any online game. It only takes 10 minutes to launch a new server, so it doesn’t impact development. Some people just enjoy more casual play or prefer to be left alone sometimes (this has been the most asked for feature for a while now). Also a PVE server wouldn’t make sense for us because it would require a new server for every geographical region (cost prohibitive), and in a sandbox game would require entirely different global game mechanics. That would take longer to implement than Wellington did, not to mention increased development time for every future patch due to balancing both server types. I hope that clears up any misconceptions. I’m closing this thread before it devolves further, so if you have specific concerns please submit a contact form message through the site, thanks.
Just an update on the server situation. Over the last few days the data centers I’ve been using have been suffering more and more from noisy neighbor issues.. stealing our CPU cycles, especially on the US servers.
I mentioned in my last notes that I’m testing new hardware with USE2. I’ve also been testing this new kind of server for a few days with BR, which regularly has over 100 unique players. The performance is definitely better on the new servers, and so far there is no CPU steal.
So I think it’s worth the costs to upgrade/migrate all the servers. I’ll be doing that asap for the old servers, starting with the US based ones which are having the most issues. I’ll also try to spin up new servers more rapidly if growth continues, as that always alleviates the load on each server. Thanks for your patience and support!
The new east coast server is live! For lack of a better name it is simply USEast2. This particular server is more costly and should perform better. So if the game keeps growing I’ll start upgrading more servers to this kind to keep gameplay smooth and alleviate lag for older servers.
The Wellington patch is going well. I made some adjustments since then: SK Boss can heal while the room is empty, and doesn’t give as much myst to weak characters. Channeling water no longer works on the edge of maps, and digging in water can occasionally cause adjacent water to become shallow. I also put in some code to fix damage on old hammers.
Will be keeping an eye on things. If you see any bugs or know of anyone blocking off houses in Wellington please submit a contact form message. Thanks, and have fun!
Over the last week I’ve been testing Wellington and fixing some bugs among other things. I fixed a server crash, and Chaos being limited by the mastery cap.
I’ve also spent a little time on promotion and there have been some more players joining lately. Most of them are real new players though some have been artificial (the ones where it says same IP as). I added some better rate limiting to character creation, logging in, and chat/whisper spam.
I’ve also added a ‘Player per IP’ limit which I can adjust easily per IP. Multiple real people playing on the same IP isn’t that common, and it’s usually no more than two people. The default limit is 5 right now though I will probably lower that. You can request to have your IP limit raised if you do play with a number of real people on the same network. The limits wont be raised for alts however, and some players may even find their limits lowered based on their play style. This is to make botting and alt abuse less convenient. Other than deliberate exploits/spamming it’s not against the rules, and we couldn’t police it all even if it was, but hopefully this will be a step in the right direction.
Testing a few recent changes:
– Invisible objects such as traps and holes are no longer sent to the client
– Skill exp gained beyond the mastery cap gets reduced for each level past the cap
– Digging up stone roads is a little easier-disabled assassin experience for duels where someone was disqualified
I’ll make it easier to get assassin experience in another patch.
This was feature was going to be in the upcoming content patch but I’m releasing it early:
– /ignore now saves player names permanently (even after logging out or server resets)
– Added command /ignorelist to see who is currently ignored
– Can clear the list with /ignorelist clear-Dogs are now safe from attacks when /pvp is off
-Moved Brazil server yet again to a much more stable host
-Testing a rare server crash fix
-Encouraged cows to be more subtle with their revolutionJust some bug fixes today:
-Chaos can hit walls again
-Training dummies can be attacked with pvp off
-Underworld tables can be attacked with pvp offThere was a report of bandages not working but I wasn’t able to reproduce this issue. Please send in more specifics on this bug if you’re still experiencing it.
I also fixed a blocked tile in the desert area, and a couple mapping issues on the snow map.
I upgraded the Brazil server last night which seems to have helped with lag and disconnects somewhat. Though I noticed some potential network issues still, so let me know if you are having problems and I will invest in better hardware again. Thanks!
Continuing with some more changes today:
New command: /pvp – This toggles whether you are in pvp mode or not. It defaults to off, but if you expect to pvp or raid then you will want it on. With pvp mode off you only damage npcs, infamous players, or your own buildings. This will prevent you from accidentally hitting structures or innocent players. You can push players without damaging them, or pve safely with players who aren’t in your tribe. Note that this only affects you. You can still be hit by others even with the pvp setting off. I’ll probably turn this into a toggle button on the client soon.
Infamy experience penalty is only active for people with over 1 minute of infamy. This way you can still gain skill experience through normal pvp fighting, including assassin.
Infamy penalties have been scaled down relative to the victim’s level. So victims will give less infamy as they gain in power, this will expand normal pvp level ranges for higher levels. For example most fights above level 80 will give about the minimum infamy penalty (1 minute). The victim’s blue stars are still factored into this formula.
Keep testing and let me know if you run into any bugs or issues. Thank you!
Some good news potentially. I’ve been testing a different version of the interpreter that runs the game and have noticed almost no loop delay compared to the usual version. Loop delay was one of the main pillars of lag which caused periodic pauses and rubber banding. I’ve been working on reducing that for a long while now.
The last half of yesterday I tested this new engine on USTexas and things were running pretty smoothly. So last night I switched USW, USE, and EU over as well, and so far everything looks great! I may be able to stop doing the nightly restarts I’ve been doing every 48 hours.
However we will have to wait and see if there are any other side effects to this new version that develop over the next few days. I’ve noticed that the CPU load has been jumping around a little more, but thanks to the optimizing from last month it hasn’t been an issue so far.
I’m hoping everyone will notice some improvement, but remember if you are playing with a poor connection, or in a country that is geographically far away from the server you are connecting to then you will still get some lag.
In addition to the lag improvements I also fixed some issues related to Bone Piles. Sometimes loot would disappear too fast, which should be fixed now. I also optimized the piles to be quicker, and to hopefully result in less ‘junk’ drops. Some of you may have noticed if you get ancient food from a bone pile it would rot away pretty quickly. If you combined it with your food it may have spoiled the entire stack. That was somewhat realistic, but I’ve changed it to now have 1 extra day before rotting away, if it was already way beyond expiration. I still wouldn’t recommend putting food from a dug up grave with your other food. Maybe if you are desperate 🙂
There have been some reports of weird graphical bugs or black screens for certain people. Some of these were due to not upgrading to the latest version (it should say 4.64.4 in the corner when you start the game). If you confirmed you do have the latest version and are still experiencing strange bugs please report as much information as possible so I can reproduce it: Which OS and browser version, or if using the app then say what type of phone you have. Explain exactly what is happening when the problem occurs – is it when you log in? Switching to a particular map? Falling in a hole? How often does it happen? Anything to help me narrow down the cause. Thanks!
Testing some more changes today:
– Fixed a bug with /reroll and quest generation that sometimes allowed the same monster to show up twice
– The SK boss spawn is no longer blocked by humans and has a slightly better AI and range
– Escape lanterns only work in the underworld now (depth 4+)I’m also looking into a few bugs, including: Dead and disconnected players showing as ‘asleep’ in the friends list, and a rare ‘Same IP’ match when it’s not really a match.
Hey all – another status update on the game. So I’ve been obsessing over the periodic lag issue these days, more than I should probably. It’s the slight rubberbanding you notice every so often, and gets worse over days of uptime. It’s what led me to rewrite most the server, and completely replace the database and network libraries. All these big changes help in a lot of ways but don’t cure the problem.
I seem to be running into some limitations of the underlying language itself at this point – where their garbage collection system is inadequate to handle all of our ‘junk’ over time. So I either have to implement my own low level memory system completely or wait for some updates the google javascript guys have coming. One of those updates will let me utilize multiple CPU cores for memory collection for example.
I added a new addition to my server panel this week that shows me the periodic ‘delay’ of each server, in addition to the cpu load. So as a result of my optimizations over the last couple of the months the cpu load, memory, and uptime don’t beep at me much anymore.. the numbers have been great. Now that I’ve added delay it’s been beeping at me again, so I can also feel your rubber-banding pain.
I’m thinking that I shouldn’t slow down content and bug fixes over this issue any longer. I’ll just slowly optimize it when I have time and restart the servers every now and then to reduce the pauses until I get a better system in place. It seems people don’t complain much until the servers have been running for some time anyways.
Another thing I added recently is a rapid system for sending my code changes to all servers and making them live instantly. It used to be a tedious process on each server. This convenience can be a double edged sword sometimes.. Normally for big changes I do phases of testing on different servers to see the effects. This week I had tested some little optimizations on my local server and then quickly sent them out to all servers which seemed fine for a while. Eventually I discovered that the spawns were not being blocked by players any longer – that was fixed easily enough (though it needs to be applied to some servers still). More critically all new players in the last couple of days were saving multiple versions of their account to the database.. which sometimes resulted in loading an older version of themselves. While established players weren’t affected, some new players were loading into a level 0 version of themselves instead of level 10 or so.. which I can only imagine was very confusing. I had to stay up late at night fixing that one, and cleaning up all the extra database records on each server. I left the highest level account I found for each player, so hopefully that’s all cleared up now. Thanks for the reports on these things by the way!
Another bug I’ve been working on, and may be fixed now, is the one where you log in and your client freezes up. Requiring you to relog again to see your character. This was a networking issue related to when you are moved off of floor tiles when you log in. I fixed all the cases of this that I know of, let me know if you still experience it.
So I need to move forward on some of my big plans and will need to devise ways to lighten my load if I’m going to ever defeat this todo list. One thing I’m implementing is like the multi-server code propagation feature I mentioned above, but applying to maps. So quick changes and additions to maps can be made live on all servers instantly. It’s a real chore at the moment. I’m also going to make a mapping server to invite people (on a trial basis) to create and test new areas for the game. If you are creative and interested feel free to send us a message about it through PMs or the contact form, though we may not respond to all requests as we can only train so many mappers at a time.
I am also having someone look into adjusting some numbers and balance for me related to equipment and npcs. Bias has always been a problem with this area but I will be supervising and approving any changes. The upcoming balance changes will hopefully be in time for the 2 year birthday of Mystera Legacy which is coming up fast (last year we got the iron age..). Though you will see new mobs before then – hopefully this week!
Anyways I’m excited to dust off the client and implement some much needed bug fixes and cosmetics soon. I apologize for all the issues and delays. I just want to make sure we have a really good core engine to build all this cool stuff on. Thanks for your testing and support.
Just a quick update on the testing and changes that I’ve been making in the background:
In the server code I replaced the networking library with one that is better maintained. It may help with lag and stability some, time will tell. All servers have been restarted to test it.
Fixed an issue some were having, where the loading bar for the game would pause or get stuck.
You can no longer get infamy if your character is sleep-attacking.
USEast needed some cleanup of underworld maps, so I did that yesterday and also changed shovels so they can’t dig beyond floor 100 for now. The cleanup is mostly automatic but I need to optimize it more so I’ll be making some more UW adjustments when I have time.
Now that underground bases are a thing we were seeing the random spawn-teleporting problem more often, on login/restarts. I changed how this works: if the server can’t find a nearby nature tile to place you on then it will try to place you on your recall tile, if it can’t do that then it will place you at crossroads.
I also made it so you can go up and down stairs even if someone is standing on them. To prevent player stacking abuse on recall tiles or stairs I made it so you can’t attack effectively if you are on the same tile as another player.
There’s some other behind the scenes work but that’s about it for now. Let me know if you find any new issues or bugs. I’ve already handed out a few diamonds for more serious reports. I added something to the contact form that saves all submissions in the database in case the email fails for any reason, so feel free to use that. You can also PM me or Kaylovespie on the forums to report things.
I’m going to shift to working on some client side issues soon (for instance some crash/lag bugs with gaining infamy among other things) and prepare for a new patch 🙂
Hi Krill, just wanted to clear some things up:
-reporting to another player is not reliable, and can’t be counted as reporting bugs to me
-you already established a means of contacting me, and successfully used it to report the character duping (and more recently that your tribemate was hacked)
-abusing bugs repeatedly is obviously not okay whether you reported them or not!
-you must report ASAP and not wait days or weeks after the exploit is discovered
-you must report even after something appears to be fixed
-saying you were planning to report something doesn’t help me unfortunately, and anyone could claim that afterwards
-please don’t assume I should be reaching out to you. Even though I eventually did, it’s your responsibility to deliver your findings to me
-you would get confirmation from me if you successfully reported a serious exploit (it being fixed is not confirmation I received the report from you). For instance with the 1 report you sent me on behalf of Badboy I immediately teleported into your base, became visible and started chatting with him about the specifics of the report.If you do love the game and have good will as you say, then you should be making absolutely sure I’m kept aware of your findings. From my perspective it looks like you were showing them off to players on multiple servers and using them during pvp, resulting in a bunch of reports against you. I never heard anything from you about any of the exploits you discovered, so I had to spend my time reproducing them all.
So with that said I just went ahead and checked with TheFurious to see if you reported anything since I never received any of this from him. He did confirm that on the 8th of December you sent him information on the item bug that was already fixed, and the costume/invis bug which I had to figure out on my own later. TheFurious says he passed them along to me through steam (I wasn’t on discord at this time), but I never received them it seems. You assumed I got it because I happened to fix it, but that was me reverse engineering it based off of reports you abused it in PvP. The speedhack wasn’t mentioned, and you claimed in the chatlog above that you didn’t report it despite saying you would weeks ago. It appears you also said ‘I like to have some fun first’ when referring to the exploits with TheFurious, but you have to understand that’s still breaking the rule for bug abuse.
So now you see why it looks pretty bad from my end. Once it seems someone is actively hiding exploits from me and abusing them I will just go into evidence collecting mode. Since it was confirmed you did make a small effort to report two of these bugs, although it wasn’t successful, I am open to partially restoring some myst upgrades for you if you reach out to me. Only on your main UST character. Please follow appropriate guidelines for reporting in the future, without abusing your findings, and I will happily award you diamonds. You have my email 🙂
Closing this topic.